The Red Badge of Courage and Selected Sh - Stephen Crane [2]
Illness cut Crane’s life short. In 1899, in Badenweiler, Germany, he collapsed with severe hemorrhaging of the lungs brought on by tuberculosis and malaria. He died in a sanitarium on June 5, 1900, five months before his twenty-ninth birthday.
In his short but brilliant career, Stephen Crane produced six novels, two collections of poetry, and more than one hundred stories, which were compiled in a ten-volume edition published by the University Press of Virginia (1969-1976). He is remembered as a pioneering writer who anticipated the styles that modernized American literature in the 1920s.
THE WORLD OF STEPHEN CRANE AND THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE
1871 Stephen Crane is born on November 1 at 14 Mulberry Street, Newark, New Jersey, the last of his parents’ fourteen children.
1878 Stephen enrolls in school. His father becomes pastor of the Drew Methodist Church in Port Jervis, in upstate New York.
1880 Stephen’s father dies of heart failure.
1883 Stephen and his mother move to Asbury Park, a town on the New Jersey coast.
1885 Concerned about Stephen’s digressions from Methodist teach ings, his mother enrolls him at Pennington Seminary, a school where his father had once been the principal. He writes his first story, “Uncle Jake and the Bell-Handle.” Stephen becomes intrigued by the battles of the Civil War and decides to pursue a career in the army.
1888 In January, Stephen enrolls at the Hudson River Institute, a semi-military school in upstate Claverack, New York. He works as a gossip reporter for his brother Townley’s news agency; his vignettes appear in “On the Jersey Coast,” a column in Townley’s New York Tribune.
1890 In February, Stephen’s first signed publication, an essay on the Christian virtues of Sir Henry Morton Stanley’s African expedi tion, appears in the school magazine. In September, he enrolls at Lafayette College, in Pennsylvania, to pursue a more practi cal profession, mining engineering. He does poorly in his studies and fails a course in theme writing. After one semester, he withdraws from Lafayette. Rudyard Kipling’s The Light That Failed, serialized in Lippincott’s magazine, inspires Stephen to de velop his own style of writing.
1891 Stephen’s mother enrolls him as a “special student” in the Scientific Course at Syracuse University, where she hopes he will be influenced by the school’s strict Methodist codes. He joins the baseball team and transfers his Delta Upsilon frater
nity membership from Lafayette. He continues to write for the New York Tribune and publishes a story, “The King’s Favor,” in the University Herald, the Syracuse literary magazine. In June, Stephen leaves Syracuse and joins the Tribune as a seasonal reporter. In August, he meets Hamlin Garland, a radical-minded young writer and critic from Boston, after he writes a review of Garland’s lecture on William Dean Howells at Avon-by-the Sea, New Jersey. Garland will have a profound influence on Stephen’s development as a writer.
1892 In July, five of Stephen Crane’s anecdotal stories about his camping and fishing trips in Sullivan County, New York, are published in the Tribune. He is dismissed from his job when his report of a parade of workers in Asbury Park embarrasses Whitelaw Reid, the Tribune‘s owner and a U.S. vice presidential candidate. In the fall, Crane moves to New York to work for the Herald. He begins to write Maggie:A Girl of the Streets, a novel about a prostitute in lower Manhattan.
1893 Maggie is published at Crane’s expense, under the pseudonym Johnston Smith. The novel catches the eye of Garland and William Dean Howells, both literary realists, who befriend Crane. In April, Crane begins to write The Red Badge of Courage.
1894 In late February, Crane and a friend dress in rags, wait in a bread line, and spend the night in a flophouse—experiences that inspire the stories “An Experiment in Misery” and “The Men in the Storm”; the latter is published in an October issue of The Arena. In the spring, Crane begins another New York novel, George’s Mother. An abridged version of The Red Badge of Courage is published